Justice Department to Investigate Entire Ferguson Police Force

The Justice Department is set to widen its efforts in Ferguson, Missouri, with a new civil-rights investigation of the city’s entire police force, according to the Washington Post. Nearby police departments will also be included in the investigation, which is, as the Postdescribed when breaking the news on Wednesday, “the Obama administration’s most aggressive step to address the Ferguson shooting.”

The new, broader investigation comes amid news that at least five Ferguson officers are already named in civil-rights lawsuits, and an in-depth report by Radley Balko on the how municipalities in St. Louis County seemingly prey on poor black communities for profit. A St. Louis County grand jury is also considering a case against Darren Wilson.

On August 9, Wilson, a Ferguson police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, black 18-year-old who was walking on a street in the St. Louis suburb. In the weeks that followed the incident, protests and, at times, clashes with heavily armored police units, captivated the nation. U.S. attorney general Eric Holder visited Ferguson to speak with locals and oversee the department’s investigation into Brown’s death.

Supporters of Wilson raised more than $400,000 in donations to two now-defunct GoFundMe pages. A collection on the same Web site for Brown’s family has raised $324,841 at the time of this writing.

Though a recent Rasmussen poll found that only 24 percent of likely U.S. voters have a favorable opinion of Holder, the attorney general’s actions in the Brown case have been welcomed by those concerned about police tactics. The Justice Department’s civil-rights division, which will handle the Ferguson-related investigations, has opened 20 similar inquiries under Holder’s guidance, a greater number than occurred in the five years that preceded Holder’s appointment. In 13 cases, the Justice Department is overseeing police departments.

But it’s still too early to know how the Justice Department will deal with individual officers, including Wilson. In an op-ed for The New York Times, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky warned that even “if the conclusion [of the grand jury and federal probes] is that the officer, Darren Wilson, acted improperly, the ability to hold him or Ferguson, Mo., accountable will be severely restricted by none other than the United States Supreme Court.”

Chemerinsky, law school dean at the University of California, Irvine, cited this year’s ruling in Plumhoff v. Rickard, and a 2011 ruling in Connick v. Thompson as examples of the Supreme Court’s pro-police, anti-accountability record.

“In recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations,” Chemerinsky wrote. “When the police kill or injure innocent people, the victims rarely have recourse.”

Holder’s own record, as the former U.S. attorney for Washington D.C. (from 1993 to 1997), has also been criticized in recent weeks. “When police violence spiraled out of control, he did little to protect Washington residents from rampaging lawmen,” James Bovard wrote in a column for USA Today. A 1999 Washington Postinvestigation into D.C. police shootings found that “D.C. police officers have shot and killed more people per resident than any other big-city police force in the 1990s.”

In a controversial move, Holder, who had by then ascended to deputy attorney general, was put in charge of the Justice Department’s review of the police shootings that had partly occurred under his tenure as the local U.S. attorney. Critics raged that Holder was in a position to review his own performance.

In Ferguson, the department will conduct a “pattern or practice” investigation, in which the department will try to determine whether the police department has habitually infringed upon the civil rights of citizens it is meant to protect and serve.